MagAO-X 2020A Stay-At-Home

This is, officially, the highest numbered “run” post achieved (so far) on this blog. Jhen’s post yesterday tied with the previous record holder, Day 44 from 2015A, what we fondly refer to as The Death Run. Arizona is opening back up. So, to some extent, is UofA research. Our lab, The XWCL, has ...

This may surprise people, but did you know that a video game theme has won a Grammy award? In 2011, the main theme of Civilization IV, “Baba Yetu” (Swahili version of The Lord’s Prayer), won a grammy award for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s). The composer is Christopher Tin and features the Soweto Gospel Choir ...

According to wikipedia, there are 22 species of venomous snakes in Arizona. One of these snakes that is shared between AZ and my hometown in Texas is the Western Diamondback Rattlesnake. If you’ve never seen one in the wild, it looks like this: Image credit: me If you’ve never seen one in the wild, you ...

One of the things I have been pursuing with little success through my PhD is trying to keep plants alive to their first birthday (or sometimes their half-birthday). I usually do well enough in the cooler months, but with summer comes me traveling, intense heat, and the monsoons that months of progress go kaput. To ...

The days have cooled down a bit, no more peaking above 100F. I’m enjoying being able to keep my blinds open while I work in the daytime. Once it becomes consistent days of being above 100F, then the blinds have to be closed at all times. One of my quarantine purchases has been getting a bicycle ...

There has been a request for baby hedgehog update photos. The people want MOAR HEDGE. Here’s the glamor shots: This one is tough to photograph! She is very jittery when out in the open, and immediately begins to look for a place to hide. I hope she mellows a bit as she ...

You probably didn’t notice this post in your feed reader on Sunday. However, I urge you not to worry about timestamps. Time no longer has any meaning, after all. Even though Eurovision 2020 is canceled, you may still watch the entrants yourself. A couple of them are even worth sharing as songs of the day. (I’d ...

I give you a baby Javelina with the zoomies. You’re welcome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unLTYV5CzcE Admittedly, it’s a mild case. But also the itchies. Wikipedia claims that the collective noun for Peccaries is “Squadron”. I’m going with it. Inspired by the grace and majesty of the Javelina, I give you Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Band”, performed ...

It’s been a week since I last blogged, and I’ve got an update on last week’s COVID-19 antibody test! The good news is: blood tests indicate I’ve successfully avoided getting sick. The bad news is, I’m therefore still at risk. Several other eXtreme Wavefront Control Lab students got tested and they had no evidence of ...

We’ve had a string of high-quality, high-effort posts recently, so it’s time to restore balance to the blog with a low-effort post. Other than my biweekly (in sense 1, not sense 2 ) visits to the grocery store ...

Hello! It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, last time was at the observatory using MagAO (Classic). Others have written about time spent on a submarines or in virtual worlds, which I think are excellent training for isolation, I’m going to opine a bit about the value of travel and particularly study abroad for ...

This week, MagAO-X was scheduled for its 2020A observation run at LCO. LCO is still closed according to recent updates, MagAO-X is still hanging out at the XWCL in Steward Observatory, and everyone continues to work from home. I decided to write this post about something that pleasantly surprised me when I visited LCO for ...

It’s officially May the 4th 2020, and may the Fourth be with you! The fourth of May is great because it’s an excuse for all of us to relive the fact that Star Wars is the greatest thing ever, even though it sometimes feels like it happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far ...

“There is nothing so American as our national parks…. The fundamental idea behind the parks…is that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us.” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt About a decade ago, I decided I was tired of not doing ...

When my friend and I are bored or need cheering we up, we send each other Star Wars prequel memes. As you can imagine during ‘these uncertain times’ we have been sending each other a lot of them. Here are some of my favorite ones so far. Starting with the obligatory coronavirus themed ones: And ...

After 29 days of the Stay At Home, I had an appointment. I had a thing to do, at a time, in a place other than my house, with another person. The University of Arizona and the State have come together to ramp up COVID-19 antibody testing, beginning with 3000 healthcare workers, 500 University students, and ...

In the days of MagAO-Classic, I would write daily blog posts 3-5 times per week. By the time we got to Day 29 in the run I would be so exhausted I was grateful for anyone to write blog posts. Now the tables have turned and here I am, belatedly showing up on the blog ...

I report to you live from my bed, where I have spent a lot of time the last six weeks or so, sleeping, (…sometimes…) working, and playing video games.

One of the best features in Tucson, in my opinion, is The Loop, a 70+ mile paved bike and pedestrian paths that encircles the city, mostly on the shoulders of a dry wash. I live pretty close to the Loop on the westside of town, and to keep active and get out of the ...

Today is the largest national holiday in the Netherlands, Kings Day. Kings Day is a bit of a difficult holiday to describe. It originates from the 19th century when the great-grandmother of the current king was reigning. The government decided that it was necessary to have a national holiday to celebrate the monarch. And so, ...

External Temperature and Dew Point vs day in April 2020. Less than a month ago, it was below freezing in our back yard. Today we cracked 100 for the first time. Our weather station. It’s not high enough to give NWS quality reports. I’d tell you my Weather Underground station i.d. but ...

I am sure a lot of you are tired of looking at the inside of your own homes, so I invite you to take a look inside of mine. Specifically at my rock collection. It may be hard to believe but mineralogy was my first science love. When I was really little (like 4) ...

As the quarantine continues with working from home on my simulation code, it’s been day-in-day-out of detective work tracking through countless cases of “Why does my output look horrible / makes no sense?”. The solution usually arrives in the form of opening the wrong file because I formatted poorly, units are missing, and a lot ...

Back in college, I used to listen to Thao & The Get Down Stay Down regularly. I haven’t kept up with their newer stuff, but they were recently in the news for the creative use of Zoom videoconferencing to make the video for their new single: Phenom. The song struck me as dissonant and strange ...

My household grew by one yesterday!  Meet Star: Star is a baby african pygmy hedgehog She’s a baby African Pygmy Hedgehog. She was born on Feb 20th, 2020, and is still so so tiny! I got her from a local breeder, Tucson Hedgehogs, who take extraordinary care of their babies, training them and adapting them ...

In the past week the heat has been slowly ramping up and it will continue to go up the next couple weeks. So staying home and inside is actually not that bad. One thing that I do have noticed is that we are going through our supply of food slightly faster than normal. It seems ...

It has long been my intention to use a XWCL blog post to spread the delights of Simon & Garfunkel with the watching world. But, well, I’m still not going to quite get around to it with this post (but halfway there!). The song of the day is “Waters of March” sung by Art Garfunkel. Feel ...

Hello everyone, my name is Justin. I’m a soon-to-be Ph.D-holder-guy in the midst of writing my dissertation on the topic of the coronagraphic architecture known as the PIAACMC (Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization Complex Mask Coronagraph). Basically this coronagraph uses everything but the kitchen sink to suppress stellar light, while preserving as much planet light as possible ...

Before I moved to Tucson, I thought there were four seasons. Since living here, I’ve learned there are five. Fall, winter, spring, summer, and the North American Monsoon. I also used to think summer started at the end of May. However, we’re already facing our first 90+ºF (32+ºC) day next week. Soon we will become nocturnal desert ...

Let’s face it. I am bored. You are bored. We all are bored. We have been in social isolation now for over a month, and if you are like me, nice clothes, makeup, even jeans are a thing of normalcy past. Every day I have been hovering between pajamas and gym clothes. One of the ways ...

Hi everyone! It’s been awhile since I’ve written a blog post but it makes me happy that the team thought to include me in their blogger recruits. I am going to do a take on Dr. Kelsey Miller’s “Views from the Apocalypse” but rather than a cute Dutch city, I’ll be reporting from the city ...

One thing I am getting out of this quarantine is exploring many recipes and using my kitchen hardware more often than making weekly meal preps. I purchased a 6-quart enameled cast iron dutch oven back in February and have used it once so far to make beef and red lentil chili. I’m very excited I ...

Being confined at home can make anyone a little bit Genghis Khan, as my cat can attest. Today’s Song of the Day is “Genghis Khan” by Miike Snow. Please enjoy the video, below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_SlAzsXa7E “Genghis Khan” by Miike Snow

From the “such a good adventure that it should be a 6 book novel published as a trilogy” department: https://youtu.be/2zNSgSzhBfM “Can’t Hold Us” feat. Ray Dalton by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis

I don’t know about all of you, but for me all of the days have started to blur together. In the mornings I find myself thinking: what activity could I do today so that today is different from yesterday (and the day before that, and the day before that…)? Luckily for me, yesterday night I ...

When every weekend is spent at home having a mild time, one must find one’s own diversions. After the cooking is done and the phone calls to friends and family concluded, I scroll idly through the daily output of internet meme-makers. This usually provides a few minutes of distraction, eventually running aground on reposts ...

Hello again! Seems like my first blog post was way more than 9 days ago, but that’s the way of things now. March was a hell of a year and April is shaping up much the same. Most days start with a thought like “Wait, is it Tuesday?”. But as I ...

“Move to Europe!”, they said. “It’ll be an adventure!”, they said. “Think of all the places you can travel to!” (I know you’re not supposed to end with a preposition, but whatever. It’s the end of the world and all that.) But now, the world has shut down, the city outside ...

I was actually aghast that Logan’s post last week was the very first appearance of the Poopie Suit on this fine blog. After nearly 8 years and more than 560 blog posts, it’s utterly ridiculous that a surface sailor posted the first poopie suit pic. She probably wasn’t even wearing tennis shoes. So let’s ...

Hello to all the wonderful blog readers out there. Although I am a long time member of the team, y’all don’t know me yet as this is my first post to the XWCL blog. So who am I? That’s a good question that I am still trying to figure out. But anyway…I (think I) am ...

Welcome, dear reader, to day 5 of XWCL’s quarantine journal entries (alternatively, your Monday distraction). We’ve had great entries so far showcasing hobbies and activities of the various XWCL members. To keep in theme, this post will cover a few of the things that I enjoy and how it’s been helping me through quarantine. COOKINGAnyone, graduate ...

Hello, and thanks for joining me. Today marks the end of week three of self-isolation and quarantine for a lot of us here in Tucson. Based on what I have been seeing on social media and my own personal experience, a lot of us are starting to get a bit stir crazy from staying at ...

It’s the first Saturday since the stay-at-home orders were announced, and I’m unwinding this weekend by, well, staying at home. Unlike most of the MagAO-X team, I’m sheltering not in Tucson but instead in my occasional residence in a corner of DC (where stay-at-home orders went into effect just a few hours after AZ). Fortunately, ...

Greetings from the home office! I’ve always been a fan of using my laptop to run my computations on other computers in the lab or data center, so you’d think this MagAO-X Stay At Home run would be mean standard operations for me. Unfortunately, while I’m rarely at my desk in my office, I’m ...

Let’s continue in the spirit of the blog post of yesterday with the introduction of another new member of the MagAO-X team. Last fall I finished my PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands and I was lucky enough to get a fellowship to work at the University of Arizona. Now I do have to ...

Greetings blog world. You haven’t heard from me yet, because this is my first post here on the XWCL blog! First let me introduce myself. I joined the group last fall as a new 1st year graduate student at Steward Observatory at Univ of Arizona in Tucson. I came from the ...

Since most of the MagAO-X team resides in Tucson, home of the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory, we are about to come under a stay-at-home policy starting tomorrow, 3/31, at 5 pm MST. This removes all doubt: there will be no MagAO-X run in 2020A. We are on the telescope schedule for ...